Incredible engineering talent went into building the Voyagers. I remember as a kid watching the early-morning tail end of the “Neptune All Night” program, which was a live PBS broadcast of the flyby of Neptune by Voyager 2.

The ping on that must be awful.

Many scientific facts, which today are almost trite, hail from only the past 50-75 years. One example is DNA — we made it through the second world war without the modern genetic theory.

The Voyager spacecrafts are another contribution. We didn’t know much of anything about the outer planets until the 1970s. Even today, if I’m not mistaken, the only close-up images of Neptune are from Voyager 2 in the late 1980s. If it weren’t for the Voyagers, those planets would still be blurry concepts.

My dad claims to have his name on one of the voyagers from being a clean room janitor at JPL at the time.

Someone should bring it back